PrettyFakes

“I call this a reunion to remember, all!”—Eudora Welty, Losing Battles, 1970.

“. . . there’s absolutely nothing in his music that’s null, detached, or perverse and even his occasional world-weariness carries a redemptive sense of lost battles passionately fought.”—Lester Bangs, writing about Bruce Springsteen in “Hot Rod Rumble in the Promised Land,” CREEM, Nov. 1975.

From a mail circulated earlier this week:

Artists and Writers of Mississippi:

Inspired by the extraordinary but sometimes underknown arts community of Jackson, we are making something we didn’t have before: a journal of arts. It is called Lost Battles.

We believe two things: first, that art can only flourish when there is a venue for it. Second, that Mississippi remains sui generis in the world for raw artistic talent. We want to showcase the great art that we see made by our friends and colleagues.

We want you to be part of it. You’re getting this letter because we like your art or because we think it represents Jackson or Mississippi (some of you are not from here, but you have ecome from here; some of you have left, but will always be a part of here). If there’s someone you know that absolutely has to be a part of this, please write us and drop a reminder, or feel free to forward this along.

Lost Battles is on track to be published by fall; our print run will be small somewhere in the triple digits) but handcrafted (one person involved keeps insisting Polaroids be attached to each volume); we will also have a website (lostbattles.com) that will reproduce the volume in its entirety. Please check this website for updates. Accordingly, we’re looking for artwork and writing that you’ve already created, and we want it by May 1st. Please send everything along in a tidy digital format (writers, please use Word or .rtf files; artists, send us decent-quality (but not hard-drive destroying) .jpgs.

We will inform you if your submission has been accepted by July 31. Then, we will have a party, and there will be whisky and beer.

Guidelines:

Poetry or song lyric submissions: Send us up to five poems or songs.

Short story/memoir/non-fiction submissions: Send us up to two pieces. Submissions that run up to 30 pages double spaced (that’s roughly 10,000 words) will be heartily welcomed. Submissions longer than 30 pages will be looked at with scrutiny and scorn, unless they’re works of stunning magic.

Plays: Send us up to two pieces, per the short story guidelines above.

Photography, drawings, and prints: Please send us up to five pieces. We must be honest and say that due to printing constraints work in black and white is preferred. If you don’t have any black and white pieces, send us something that can easily be translated into black and white or something so fantastic that will make us lovingly hand-attach color reproductions.

We’ve already spent quite a bit of time and effort in putting together guidelines and infrastructure. We’re trying to build something for you to climb on. If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or adulation, please send it along.

xo,

The Editors

In the words of a famed Georgian philosopher, DO YOU HAS?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 9:03 am and is filed under Books, Gorjus, In Mississippi, Polaroids, Springsteeniana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.